A Social Metric Approach to E-Learning Evaluation in Education

The use of e-learning in education is an ever-increasing practice. E-learning could generate effective learning for education. There are several factors affecting the creation of successful e-learning for education as well as several criteria possibly applied to evaluate the effectiveness. The “traditional” way (questionnaire, interview, information system analysis) to measure effectiveness is not enough in e-learning measure of effectiveness because part of the information, that coming from social networks, will be lost. This paper, after identifying the Critical Success Factors (CSFs) of a synchronous e-learning system, and identifying the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), proposes an approach for evaluation based on the analysis of information derived from social aspects. The paper proposes a set of CSFs and KPIs to study the students’ perception and highlights how to measure the KPIs using social software information.